Grappling with Christopher Hitchens

Keith Miller examines a trenchant critique of the late Christopher
Hitchens.

The journalist, essayist and public speaker Christopher Hitchens, who died just over a year ago of oesophageal cancer, was no slouch when it came to the gentle art of making enemies. Liberal isolationists, religious fanatics, female comedians – all felt the wrath of his bombast. On a more intimate level, he had a talent for tiffs and squabbles, takedowns and feuds, that made Truman Capote look like a Buddhist monk. So it would perhaps be surprising if his shade were allowed to rest in peace for long.

Unhitched by Richard Seymour (Verso, £9.99) is the first book to cast a cold eye on Hitchens’s career in the wake of his death, and assess its possible legacy. It won’t be the last; nor, probably, the best. But by being the first it – courageously, maybe – risks being seen as the nastiest, trundling off the presses while its subject is still a few degrees above room temperature. Seymour claims that Hitch was a hypocrite: that his writing, his political allegiances and, most notably, his friendships were marked by professions of loyalty, and acts of desertion.

It is from his memoir Hitch-22 that two main, and interrelated, themes of Unhitched are drawn: the lifelong melodrama of friendship, and the idea that political life consists of a series of actions and gestures rather than a coherent programme of belief and commitment. A good example of this is Hitchens’s belief that being waterboarded for a story added the tiniest microgramme of weight to his opinion that it should be allowed in a country that claimed to be not only civilised, but also competent to export its civilisation overseas by force of arms.

That the second theme inflects on the first can be seen from the Rushdie affair, when the targeting of a British author by religious fundamentalists galvanised what had hitherto been a fairly lukewarm affection for Rushdie on Hitchens’s part – and vulcanised his opposition to hardline religious belief. It can also be seen in his repudiation of Edward Said (Hitchens’s hostile review of Said’s reissued Orientalism followed the latter’s death by about the same time-lag as Unhitched follows his); and in his denunciation of Sidney Blumenthal for perjuring himself in the Lewinsky inquisition, which cost him most of the few friends he still had on the American Left.

It’s the political triangulations that get Seymour’s blood boiling. A pattern of discarding causes when they ceased to be expedient, a willingness to kiss up to power while emitting torrents of bluster about his lonely duty to speak truth to it, can be identified even in the salad days of Seventies Oxford. Hitchens is quite funny about his youthful double life in Hitch-22, swapping his donkey jacket for a dinner jacket on the hoof between the barricades at Cowley and High Table like some arriviste superhero (he was quite funny about lots of things, though he could be eye-gougingly unfunny when he tried to be funny). But Seymour sees Hitchens’s tragic last act – the alliance with the neo-cons, the borderline racism, the ghastly statements about cluster bombs – as inevitable.

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It has to be said that Seymour’s perspective is coloured by his own orthodox Left-wing views. From the get-go, Hitchens was a “non-aligned” Leftist – variously a Trotskyist, an International Socialist (though there surely was a whiff of opportunism about when and how he forsook this particular group – this episode, as recounted in both Hitch-22 and Unhitched, reminds me of Hannibal Lecter murdering his patient Benjamin Raspail because “his therapy wasn’t going anywhere”), and, later, the Supreme Leader of a cadre of one. He claimed still to be a Marxist quite late on – and if he didn’t exactly talk or think like one, maybe that’s just because he represented a later stage in the evolution of Homo revolutionalis than the rest of us. Seymour retains the straightedge habit of mistaking errors of judgment (the term of art is analysis) for flaws of character.

The obvious thing to say about this well-argued but somewhat doughy book is that it is motivated by envy. This is what Hitchens’s old friend Martin Amis says any time his own work is criticised. But I think Seymour rather pitied Hitchens, as the married man pities the philanderer. Yet his fastidiousness means he is unwilling, rather than unable, to do this job as it needs to be done – to grapple properly with the complexities of this fascinating man. What he does say about Hitchens’s parents, or about his discovery in middle age of a Jewish heritage, or about his friendship with Amis (which survived Hitchens’s criticism of Amis’s dreadful book about Stalin, and thereby constitutes a unique instance of Hitchens refraining from his usual bolting policy) is all perfectly to the point.

But there’s clearly much more that could be said. Hitchens’s extraordinary dithyrambs about young soldiers during the early days of the Iraq adventure could do with being held up to the light of his own youthful bisexuality, to cite one example.

To cite another, there’s the fact that this rampagingly ambitious writer (and Hitchens had some degree of literary sensibility, unlike almost everyone who chooses to write about politics) made a lifelong professional commitment to the lowly and ephemeral form of journalism. With his gifts (and his contacts) you’d surely have expected a novel or two – it looks good on the CV, apart from all else. But maybe you need a more coherent grasp of reality than he had if you’re to write fiction.

Still, Hitchens would surely concede that the mere fact of being the subject of at least one posthumous book, even a thinnish book such as this, assures him a booth in the celestial dive bar that is the hacks’ pantheon.